Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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Namiand, Arlette

b. 1951, France

Playwright and director

A collaborator and dramaturg for Jean-Paul

Wenzel at the Centre Dramatique National

(CDN) at Les Fédérés, Montluçon, Namiand

is the author of many works, some of them

performed at the CDN and directed by

Wenzel. They include Surtout quand la nuit

tombe (Especially When Night Falls) and Sang

blanc (White Blood). Her adaptations include

works by Maupassant and Koestler.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Cayrol, R. (1991) Les Médias: presse écrite,

radio, télévision, Paris: PUF (a wide-rang-

ing study including introduction to histori-

cal development and current state of news-

paper industry, and profiles of individual

titles).

Charon, J.-M. (1991) La Presse en France de

1945 à nos jours, Paris: Éditions du Seuil

(a lively analysis of the decline of the na-

tional press).

Kuhn, R. (1995) The Media in France, Lon-

don and New York: Routledge (an excel-

lent overview of historical, political and

economic aspects of the press; systematic

and comprehensive).

Pedley, A. (1993) ‘The Media’, in M.Cook

(ed.) French Culture Since 1945, London:

Longman (provides useful insights).

nationalism

France occupies a special place in the history

of nationhood and nationalism. By the seven-

teenth century, it was already a ‘prototype’

nation-state with well-established frontiers

and a burgeoning central state apparatus.

More significantly, however, the French Revo-

lution is commonly identified as the birthplace

of modern nationalism as a political ideology.

The revolutionary notion that state legitimacy

should be founded on popular consent within

a defined territory was the catalyst for the na-

tion-building process in nineteenth-century

Europe, and for the subsequent ascendancy of

the idea of ‘nation’ as the dominant principle

of state organization worldwide.

At one level, nationalism in France may be

seen as a process of social integration which

progressively overcame regional and sectional

loyalties, and was characterized in particular

by the dominant role of the state as an agent

of national ‘assimilation’, from the Third Re-

public’s conversion of ‘peasants into French-

men’ to the nationalizing impetus of Fifth Re-

public presidentialism.

At another level, however, the idea of na-

tion in France has been profoundly divisive.

In 200 years punctuated by war, revolution

and changes of regime, diverse ideologies and

movements have sought to appropriate the

discourse of nationalism and to identify their

political aspirations as the authentic expres-

sion of ‘national’ values. This produced a com-

plex dialectical process in which nationalism

moved between Left and Right, between anti-

state populism and ‘state patriotism’, between

an open, voluntarist (‘civic’) conception of na-

tionality and a closed, deterministic (‘ethnic’)

version.

During the Nazi occupation, these nuances

were simplified and polarized into an opposi-

tion between two distinctive national value

systems and ‘histories’, exemplified by Vichy’s

Revolution nationale and the Liberation dis-

course of the Resistance Left. In the postwar

era, however, these simple polarities have lost

their resonance. France’s reduced status in a

nationalism

391

changed world, the emerging ‘bloc’ system of

the Cold War, the construction of Europe, the

painful experience of decolonization, pro-

duced multiple and contradictory cleavages in

the political community of the Fourth Repub-

lic. This fragmentation provided the basis for

the new synthesis achieved by the Gaullist na-

tionalism of the 1960s, which successfully

buried old antagonisms by developing a con-

sensus around presidentialism, economic mod-

ernization, and the theme of an ‘independent’

foreign and defence policy which exploited the

space provided in the international bloc sys-

tem by a period of relative détente.

Ironically, it was under de Gaulle that

France’s membership of the European Com-

munity, coupled with state-sponsored eco-

nomic modernization, opened her economy to

the accelerating processes of market globalism

which have progressively undermined the au-

tonomy of nation-states in the field of economic

and other related areas of policy-making. The

failure of the French Left’s own version of eco-

nomic nationalism (‘Keynesianism in one coun-

try’) in 1981–2, followed by the collapse of

the Communist command-economies and the

demise of the bloc system on which France’s

‘independent’ foreign policy was predicated,

have deeply undermined the credibility of na-

tionalism as a political programme.

At the same time, the emergence in France

of a pluralistic, multiethnic, post-industrial

society has weakened the appeal of the his-

toric homogenizing myths of French nation-

hood. The increasing separation of state and

nation has produced something of a crisis of

national identity, and the Front National’s

successful politicization of race and immigra-

tion may be seen as symptomatic of this deeper

malaise. Feeding on nostalgia for lost national

status, and on the quest for identity in the face

of economic and cultural globalization, it has

appropriated a nationalist discourse now

largely abandoned by mainstream political

parties.

BRIAN JENKINS

See also: economy; European Union; racism/

anti-semitism

Further reading

Hoffmann, S. (1974) Decline or Renewal:

France Since the 1930s, New York, Viking

(contains an influential and pioneering es-

say on the idea of ‘nation’ in France).

Jenkins, B. (1990) Nationalism in France: Class

and Nation Since 1789 , London, Routledge

(an analysis of the ideological dynamics of

French nationalism since the Revolution).

Silverman, M. (1992) Deconstructing the Na-

tion: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship

in Modern France, London, Routledge (situ-

ates the contemporary issue of immigration

within the framework of the historical French

conception of nationality and citizenship).

Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The

Modernisation of Rural France 1870–1914,

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (the

classic study of the development of French

national consciousness under the Third Re-

public).

nationalization and

privatization

The evolution of the public sector in France

during the last few decades has been turbu-

lent. After the 1945–6 nationalizations, it de-

veloped during the ‘thirty glorious years’ of

growth, with the nationalized companies tak-

ing a leading role in the modernization of the

economy. The extensive new nationalization

programme in the financial and industrial sec-

tors implemented in 1981 nearly doubled the

size of the commercial public sector. However,

since 1986, several privatization programmes

have reduced the size and importance of the

public sector.

Intervention in the economy by the strong

arm of the state, including the public owner-

ship of firms, is not a recent phenomenon. In

the ‘mercantile’ period of the late seventeenth

century, in Holland or England, private enter-

prise was financing new developments, but in

France it was under the initiative of the

nationalization and privatization

392

absolutist royal power that merchants partici-

pated in new industrial endeavours, especially

under the direction of Colbert, minister of

Louis XIV (hence the neologism, Colbertisme,

meaning state interventionism). The King

owned, or was the patron of, the celebrated

Manufactures Royales (Aubusson, Sèvres,

Gobelins, arsenals, shipyards).

It is not surprising, then, that despite the

influence of the liberal ideology of the Revo-

lution, interventionism reappeared in France

at the beginning of the twentieth century, when

a ‘technocratic’ ideology of ‘public service’

developed, according to which efficient and

publicly managed institutions had to be sub-

stituted for inefficient markets for the com-

mon good. The economic crisis of the 1920s

and 1930s reinforced these views, often sup-

ported by conservative segments of society.

From another angle, Socialists and Marxists

were also calling for the ‘collectivization’ of

means of production, or at least for their na-

tionalization. The ‘Popular Front’ govern-

ment, which came to power in 1936, con-

ducted the first nationalizations.

A large nationalized sector was created,

during the period September 1944 to May

1946, mostly by de Gaulle’s provisional gov-

ernment, either because previous private own-

ers had collaborated with the Nazis (Renault)

or because of the strategic importance of the

company for the reconstruction of France.

This affected energy utilities (Charbonnages

de France, EDF, GDF), transport companies

(there was a full nationalization of Air France

and SNCF), industrial firms (Renault,

SNECMA), the Banque de France and the four

main high-street banks (Société Générale,

Crédit Lyonnais, and two others later to merge

into the BNP) and most insurance companies.

The public sector continued to extend dur-

ing the ‘thirty glorious years’ of growth that

followed the war, either via the creation of new

concerns or via the grouping of smaller, ailing

private industrial companies into a larger pub-

lic firm (such as Aérospatiale). The public sec-

tor was used as the driving force for the rest

of the economy (especially for industrial rela-

tions) and was responsible for a very high pro-

portion of investments. The public and pri-

vate sectors were not always opposed: indeed,

numerous Sociétés d’Économie Mixte (half

private, half public) also developed during the

1960s, especially for local utilities.

The victory of the Left in the 1981 elec-

tions brought a new wave of nationalizations,

affecting most of the remaining private finan-

cial institutions such as Suez and Paribas in-

vestment banks, and the largest industrial

groups (such as Pechiney, Thomson, Rhône-

Poulenc, etc.). Private shareholders were com-

pensated at full market price. The strategy was

for the state to control strategic and monopo-

listic companies in order to influence invest-

ment strategies, create employment, improve

social relations and provide the private sector

with competitive examples.

The 1981 nationalizations had mixed re-

sults. The short-term impact was considerable:

‘in 1985, there were over 3,000 nationalized

commercial firms, with 1.86 million employ-

ees. In industry alone, nationalized companies

accounted for a fifth of employment, a third

of investment and exports, and nearly a quar-

ter of turnover. The balance sheet of

nationalizations had positive aspects. A

number of loss-making firms were restruc-

tured and reorganized after nationalization,

and from 1985–6 started to be profitable.

However, costs to the public purse were con-

siderable. Furthermore, the justifiability of the

programme was weakened when the Social-

ists changed economic strategy in 1983, em-

bracing the belief that the ‘discipline of mar-

ket forces’ had to be respected by public sec-

tor firms as well as private ones. Consequences

were immediate, with companies such as

Renault, previously a ‘social laboratory’, shed-

ding tens of thousands of employees in order

to improve competitiveness. The position of

nationalized firms was also weakened by the

European Community reinforcement of com-

petition and anti-monopolistic rule, and its

limiting of opportunities for state capital fund-

ing.

In this context, in 1986 the Chirac right-wing

government launched an initial wave of

privatizations, shedding its ‘Gaullist’ inheritance.

nationalization and privatization

393

The denationalization programme was imple-

mented only partially (for instance, the Société

Générale, Paribas, Saint-Gobain, Matra and

TF1 were sold). Popular at first, it was slowed

down by the financial crisis of November

1987, and its implementation was criticized,

as part of the capital was set aside for stable

institutional investors amid allegations of po-

litical favouritism. The 1988 re-election of

Mitterrand interrupted the privatization proc-

ess, but only temporarily. The attempt to

freeze public and private sectors soon proved

unrealistic. In 1991 the Socialist government

started to ‘part-privatize’ firms such as Elf,

Total, Rhône-Poulenc, etc. The role of the na-

tionalized industries, increasingly managed as

private concerns, was appearing less central

to public policies.

Indeed, when the conservative coalition

came back to power after the parliamentary

elections of 1993, a new, wider privatization

programme was launched, which proved to

be far less controversial. This time, conditions

were regulated by an independent commis-

sion. Soon, jewels of the public sector were

sold, such as the BNP, the insurance company

UAP, Renault, Elf and Usinor-Sacilor. Other

groups were in line, such as Aérospatiale and

Thomson, but some of those concerned are

required to effect first a return to profitability

and a complete reorganization. This is the case

for Air France and, more particularly, for the

Credit Lyonnais, one of the three largest high-

street banks, and one which was rocked by

scandals and unsound financial strategies dur-

ing the late 1980s.

The 1993 privatization plans excluded utili-

ties such as EDF, France Telecom and the Post

Office. However, as European competition

laws are becoming stricter, the French concept

of ‘public services’ is tending to weaken, and

this prepares the opening of public utilities to

private capital. It seems that, in the future, lit-

tle will remain of the ‘nationalized’ sector

which for four decades had been at the heart

of the French development model.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

Further reading

Rand Smith, W. (1990) ‘Nationalizations for

What? Capitalist Power and Public Enter-

prise in Mitterrand’s France’, Politics and

Society, March (this explains the changes

occurring in the 1980s).

Ross, G., Hoffmann, S. and Malzachert, S.

(eds) (1987) The Mitterrand Experiment:

Continuity and Change in Socialist France,

Cambridge: Polity Press (an analysis of the

context of the 1981 nationalizations).

Navarre, Yves

b. 1940, Condom, Gascony;

d. 1994, Paris

Writer

Navarre’s prolific output of novels since the

first, Lady Black, in 1971, often returns to the

same themes of homosexuality, death, melan-

choly, scarred childhoods, cats, and the op-

pressions of the bourgeois family. In Cronos’

Children (Le Jardin d’acclimatation) of 1980,

which won the Goncourt prize, a patriarch has

his gay son lobotomized. His formally ambi-

tious Biographic (Biography) of 1981 provides

autobiographical keys to much of this mate-

rial. Demoralized by illness, a conflict with

publishers which had sent him into residence

in Montreal, and the loss of friends to AIDS—

as in 1991’s Ce sont amis que vent emporte (It

is Friends the Wind Bears Away)—he commit-

ted suicide.

BILL MARSHALL

See also: autobiography; gay writing; literary

prizes

Négresses vertes, Les

Musicians

Négresses vertes, Les

394

A popular indie group which appeared on the

French scene in 1987—a hybrid band like

Mano negra, which out of creative necessity

mixes styles and inspirations. Their musical

roots are in Memphis, Seville, Algiers and

Joinville-le-Pont. They sing in French, accom-

panied by accordions, drums, piano, guitars

and export worldwide their joie de vivre. Their

lyrics are full of humour and derision. They

see the world as a Famille nombreuse (Big

Family)—the title of their penultimate album.

In 1995, they performed their album

ZigZague in London.

GÉRARD POULET

See also: beur music; rock and pop; song/

chanson

new philosophers

The ‘new philosophers’ emerged in 1976–7 as

a grouping of intellectuals determined to at-

tack the leading left-wing ideologies and rein-

state traditional values as a legitimate focus of

commitment.

By the mid-1970s, the idealism and opti-

mism of the May 1968 movements had largely

evaporated. Many intellectuals who had put

their hopes in revolutionary groups, especially

Maoists or Trotskyists, now turned their back

on these, and looked for radically different al-

ternatives. Linking up with earlier spiritual

traditions and with an older generation of

right-wing activists, represented by Maurice

Clavel, they launched a political and philo-

sophical attack on the intellectuals of the Left.

They were strongly influenced by reading

Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, pub-

lished in French in 1974, and containing a de-

tailed denunciation of Soviet labour camps.

The ‘new philosophers’ saw totalitarianism as

the main crime of the Left, and the Commu-

nists and Socialists were attacked for their po-

litical complicity, in works such as André

Glucksmann’s The Cook and the Man-eater

(La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes) of

1975 and Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Barbarism

with a Human Face (La Barbaric a visage

humain) of 1977. They particularly attacked

the most influential theoretical frameworks of

the previous decade, especially Marxism and

Freudian psychoanalysis, both considered to-

talitarian and inherently oppressive, a case

made in Glucksmann’s 1977 The Master

Thinkers (Les Maîtres penseurs), and Clavel’s

What I Believe (Ce que je crois) of 1976. The

criticism was often extended to include large

sections of the European intellectual tradition

since the eighteenth century, notably the pro-

duction of large-scale philosophical syntheses,

and the reliance on notions of reason, progress

and the values of the Enlightenment, all of

which could be associated with past or present

totalitarian practices. Other writers associated

with the group included Guy Lardreau, Chris-

tian Jambet, Jean-Paul Dollé, Michel Guérin

and Philippe Némo.

The content of their work drew heavily on

the Cold War polemics of the 1950s, and on

the ideas of Raymond Aron, Friedrich

Nietzsche and Catholic spiritualism. It was the

philosophers and not the philosophy that were

new, as several of them agreed. However, their

arrival made a considerable public impact, in

part because most of them were formerly as-

sociated with the radical Left, and in part be-

cause they presented the novelty of intellectu-

als supporting the government, then under

Giscard d’Estaing’s liberal Right presidency.

They helped to set the ideological climate of a

close-fought legislative election campaign, and

are often thought to have contributed to the

surprise victory of the governing coalition in

March 1978.

Their impact also derived from a sophisti-

cated awareness of the power of the media, as

a result of which their emergence in 1976–7

was given wide coverage in the press and on

television in France, and taken up by the in-

ternational media, eager to find a new French

avant-garde.

Inevitably, the ‘new philosophers’ were ve-

hemently attacked by many prominent left-

wing intellectuals, who typically saw them as

being superficial and opportunistic, scraping

together the worn-out clichés and superstitions

new philosophers

395

of the Right and presenting them as a glossy

and marketable product. Paradoxically, these

attacks served to give the philosophers in ques-

tion a greater prominence.

What the ‘new philosophers’ shared was a

criticism of the intellectual traditions of the

French Left, rather than a positive alternative.

Their differences rapidly emerged in the later

1970s, as the French intelligentsia adjusted to

the end of the postwar intellectual dominance

of the Left. Lévy, the editor of their book se-

ries with Grasset, and unofficial leader, for-

mally declared the nonexistence of the ‘new

philosophy’ in April 1978 (in La Nef 35).

MICHAEL KELLY

See also: Catholicism and Protestantism;

Marxism and Marxian thought

Nichet, Jacques

b. 1942, Albi

Director

A leading figure in the Théâtre de l’Aquarium

in the 1970s and the founder of the Maison

Antoine Vitez international theatre translation

centre in 1990. He has been the director of

the Centre Dramatique National du

Languedoc Roussillon-Montpellier since

1986, where he has developed a contempo-

rary and Mediterranean repertoire, including

plays by Lorca, Calderón and de Filippo, and

has promoted contemporary comedy.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Barthes, R. (1954) ‘Littérature objective’, Cri-

tique 10.

Britton, C. (1992) The Nouveau Roman: Fic-

tion, Theory, and Politics, London:

Macmillan (an excellent overview and

analysis).

Heath, S. (1972) The Nouveau Roman: A

Study in the Practice of Writing, London:

Elek (emphasizes collective goals and tech-

niques).

Higgins, L.A. (1996) New Novel, New Wave,

New Politics: Fiction and the Representa-

tion of History in Postwar France, Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press (analyses for-

mal innovations in metahistoriographic

terms).

Oppenheim, L. (ed.) (1986) Three Decades of

the French New Novel, Urbana and Chi-

cago: University of Illinois Press (proceed-

ings of a colloquium on historical

retrospectives by novelists and critics).

Ricardou, J. (1973/1990) Le Nouveau Ro-

man, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Ricardou, J. and van Rossum-Guyon, F. (eds)

(1972) Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd’hui,

2 vols, Paris: UGE.

Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965) For a New Novel:

Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard,

New York: Grove.

Roudiez, L.S. (1991) French Fiction Revisited,

Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press

(an introduction to the oeuvre of individual

novelists).

Nouvel Observateur, Le

Newspaper

Le Nouvel Observateur is a left-wing intellec-

tual weekly, created by industrialist Claude

Perdriel and editorial director Jean Daniel on

19 November 1964, with moral support from

Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Mendès France.

Its origins go back to the political weekly

L’Observateur, launched in 1950 by former

members of the Resistance. Renamed France-

Observateur in 1954, this became a politically

outspoken, polemical title, rallying all factions

of the non-Communist Left. It was among the

first newspapers to denounce torture in Alge-

ria, and was accused of undermining the mo-

rale of French troops. The newspaper’s

premises were bombed, and the paper seized

repeatedly by the authorities. It also played a

prominent cultural role, attracting contribu-

tions from historians François Furet and Denis

Richet, sociologist Edgar Morin, Nouvelle

Vague film directors, artists and intellectuals.

Declining interest in politics following the

end of the Algerian war and internal conflicts

led to falling circulation in the early 1960s.

L’Express was also losing readers, and re-

sponded by adopting a new formula. Its editor

Nouvel Observateur, Le